New Love for Freelancing

Say what?

That’s right – a war against the friend to freelancers. Right?

From oDesk:

oDesk enables buyers of services to hire, manage, and pay technology service providers from around the world. Buyers choose oDesk for top global talent, comprehensive management tools, and a flexible hourly payment model. Service Providers choose oDesk for challenging jobs and guaranteed payment. Every day, thousands of buyers and providers work together through oDesk — a unique company at the forefront of reinventing work.

So, it’s all gravy, right? I thought about signing up their and doing some freelancing myself – I saw a few mootools projects pop-up, and I fancy me some mootools development.

“God, it’s like dealing with people you got away from work to begin with.”

Dude. I didn’t leave Corporate Internet to be your bitch.

I know, I know. That’s not what oDesk is – right? I’ve never used it, but from the “quality” of what I’ve seen, I have mixed feelings about becoming involved. It’s really five-and-diming development – and as a developer that has had to take over tasks from the lowest-common-denominator (*cough*webconsultants*cough*) it’s easy to see that YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

So I should pay top-dollar for premium development?

No – you should pay what you can afford.
If you can afford someone at $60/hour you should hire someone at that rate – not the guy that comes around and tries to undersell your guy with “I’ll do it for $25″ – because very often if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

I’m not saying that maybe you’re luck – but very often those lowest bidders underbid and end up under delivering because they just meant to get you in, and then get you at the point of either:

A) You’re stuck with them because you’ve wasted too much of your budget to start over.

B) They’ve been paid and you end up going with the higher priced guy/company anyways, maybe with some savable work.

So what are you going to do about it, hotshot?

I’ll find the work for all of you, I’ll get you paid what you’re worth, and I’ll make all of us rich in the process. I’ll be blogging about this as it takes shape, but it’s surprisingly concrete and specific in my head what I need to do, and how I’m going to do it. I am glad someone showed me what Odesk is because it’s everything that I’m not.

And he’s shown me before he’s not one to talk smack – so I’m going to be keeping an eye on this.